


Love and War

by Milieu



Series: A Game of Beautiful Madness [2]
Category: Changeling: The Lost, World of Darkness (Games)
Genre: Changelings, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Minor Violence, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 16:58:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10813092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milieu/pseuds/Milieu
Summary: Brothers-in-arms, until we die.





	Love and War

On good nights, Mars couldn't tell whether Az dreamed. He lay mostly still and mostly silent, breathing steadily, fingers occasionally twitching, but never reaching for the weapons he kept within reach of the bed (a switchblade under the pillow, a sword beneath the bed. No guns, never guns.)

Az dreamed often, and they usually woke him when he did. Sometimes Mars would hear him sit up, breathing hard, before he crept out to the kitchen for a glass of water. Sometimes he turned on the TV and sat in the living room until morning, staring at the screen but not absorbing what he saw. The nights that he didn't wake on his own were worse because Mars would have to get out of bed and shake him awake, pin Az's arms against his sides so he couldn't grab something he might hurt himself or someone else with, sometimes deal with Az's sinking his teeth into Mars's shoulder and calling him a slanted commie fuck before he woke up and realized that he wasn't in the jungle, that there were no enemies here, Viet Cong or Fae or otherwise. (And in the morning, he would lightly swat Az on the back of the head while Az groggily poured cereal and remind him that it wasn't the 1960's anymore and they had to at least pretend that they lived in a post-racism society.)

The worst nights were the ones when there was gunfire from somewhere in the neighborhood, when sirens cut through the night, when Mars would wake too late and find Az huddled in the bathroom with his hands clenched around the hilt of his sword and Az would hiss at him to get down you idiot, get on the ground, they'll see you, I don't want you to die here man, and Mars couldn't do anything but cram himself into the bathtub next to Az and keep his hand firmly on Az's wrist to keep him from jerking the sword around. In the morning, nothing would remain of the episode except a soundbite on the news about violence in another low-class neighborhood and the gouges that Az's talons left in the cheap porcelain of the tub.

Azazel Love had clawed his way out of the jungle and into the thorns and into another battlefield, leaving behind some thing spun together of bird bones and magic that would get its leg blown off by a landmine instead of him, without so much as the courtesy to leave a body behind for his family. Azazel Love had not been his name then, but when Mars stumbled into the beautiful, terrifying, birdlike thing with feathers like a peacock and eyes like a man and a wicked blade clutched in its talons, he had just been able to make out the tattered, old-fashioned uniform draped around it and the remaining shred of a nametag reading "Lovel", the rest of whoever he had been lost to that timeless jungle.

When they clashed, one under the banner of the Queen of Clouds and Feathers and the other rending flesh for the King of Dust and Bones, it was the first time either had been evenly-matched in battle there. When they were both exhausted, Mars's eyes had seized upon that uniform again, and he remembered just enough about it to ask where his opponent had served.

('Nam, man, 'Nam. Where the hell's Iraq? Never heard of it.)

There had been others, at some point, other deserters like them. Mars couldn't remember any of their faces. When they had cut their way back through, the thorns tearing away bits of glamour-spun flesh to reveal the true form underneath, only he and Az had emerged together on the other side.

They had been comrades then, but not friends (and Az always pronounced the word "comrade" with a badly exaggerated Russian accent, so it was hard to tell if he ever meant it well). The first time Az casually called him a spic, Mars had popped him hard on the back of the head, and they had all but demolished their tiny, run-down hovel of an apartment in the ensuing fight and been summarily evicted. When Mars had remarked with ironic humor on the fact that they were essentially homeless veterans, Az hadn't gotten it.

They hadn't liked each other then, but they hadn't abandoned each other. They had fought side by side for their freedom, and they would fight side by side for their place in the world that had forgotten them. After a while, there were others. After a while, it wasn't the flag, or a tyrant's banner that they flew, but the mantle of the Summer Court. After a while, Az slapped Mars on the back and called him brother, and it felt like he meant it, this half-man living in the wrong time, still reeling with a different generation's traumas and prejudices and pride.

And when Az stood tall in the Court, blade planted in front of him, the red of his hair and blue of his eyes and lips almost blindingly bright, when he was not a soldier but a knight, when he really, truly believed in what he was fighting for because he had taken up the sword of his own free will and not because of the draft or some inhuman monarch - those were good days.

Those were the days when Mars was proud of him.

\---

Mars was huge, imposing, frightening, monstrous. He had been shaped by violence, though he abhorred it. Az didn't ask about what he had seen in some faraway desert, about the bones he had stripped clean to turn over as tribute in another war. On the days when Mars sat lost and quiet, thumbing through an old photo album looking back at a man who no longer existed, at the wife and children that didn't know he had ever gone missing, Az looked over his shoulder and didn't ask. He hadn't quite gotten to the family and picket fence stage before his own life went off the rails.

Sometimes he provided a distraction.

(The hell kinda Mexican name is Mars anyhow?

It's short for Marshall.

That ain't Mexican, dummy.

Neither am I, dummy.)

Sometimes he just provided movement, background noise, same as when he turned on the TV without watching it on those awful nights. He'd sit and preen the feathers in his hair, polish and sharpen his weapons and then do the same for his talons, muttering the words to some half-remembered song that had played on the radio sixty years ago. He'd order a pizza or, if he was feeling adventurous, he'd try actually using the apartment's frankly rather suspect stove. He'd set a plate and a beer in front of Mars and sprawl out next to him on the couch, taking up too much space and getting Mars to complain, to nudge him out of the way, and then they'd both be back in the real world (what a term for it) and shoot the shit or whatever.

Az would wonder whether Mars's deserts blurred together in his mind like Az's jungles did. He would watch Mars smile politely at some guy at the gas station whom Az was pretty sure looked more or less exactly like the kind of guys Mars had been trained to shoot, and he'd idly wonder if that was a minority thing, of if Mars just liked to remember what it was to have lips, to have a smile that wasn't some hellish maw stretching almost ear to ear, all the better to eat you with my dear. He would wonder if it had been an intentionally cruel joke on Mars's Keeper's part to give such a monstrous countenance to a man with such kind and gentle eyes, a man who became a soldier because he had no other options, who had done everything he could not to fight only for the war to find him, one way or another.

Marshall Gutierrez had never embraced violence, but he had lived it. He never said so, but Az could see in the way Mars looked at those people who spoke too loud when they were drunk, the ones who loomed over others because they wanted a thrill of power. Marshall Gutierrez had been the one to abandon the war in Faerie and drag Az and the others (there had been others, but they were gone somewhere along the way) back to humanity with him. It wasn't fair, Az thought, to make some jerk like him beautiful and someone like Mars a monster.

Only he wasn't a monster, because monsters are their actions, not their faces. He had no shining armor, but he was a knight, loyal and brave, and Az couldn't remember exactly when he had decided he trusted Mars with his life more than anyone else, but he did.

Semper fidelis, my brother, you got my back while I've got yours, and nobody can take that away from us again. I take up the sword, knowing that you will do the same next to me. Ours is not a war of ideals, but safety, necessity, freedom. The only good thing to come out of all these hells I've lived is that I get to have you by my side.

Az didn't say it often enough, but he was proud of Mars too.

**Author's Note:**

> Az is a Fairest Gandharva, and Mars an Ogre Gristlegrinder. They belong to a homebrewed entitlement of the Summer Court which has no official name, but whose members are referred to as knights.


End file.
